Storage demands for data storage systems tend to increase over time, as more and more information is converted to digital form. As the demands for storage space increase, storage density becomes increasingly important. Shingled magnetic recording techniques have been developed as one way to increase storage density at a device level, but devices using shingled magnetic recording techniques have certain operational characteristics that may be taken into account when they are deployed in data storage systems; for example, it may be impractical to write data to shingled magnetic recording devices in a non-sequential fashion, similarly to many tape-based storage devices. On such devices, deletions and data migration often create gaps of unused yet unusable regions on a sequential file system, resulting in a waste of valuable storage space.